mgo.licio.us

"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

Michigan

A week after talking a solid 3 star DB out of signing with us we follow that up with a marginal (as soon as we saw he was a white boy playing receiver we knew that) 3 star recruit that only has one other choice, Stanford? Really, that is the direction we want to go? Out of our 20 recruiting class we are going to have 4 good WR, and 4-5 marginal WR/RBs, 2 QB's, and a small assortment of others? Really? Again we have to remind Belein and Rodriguez that they are at a major university. Maybe even a top 5 University and penciling in just anyone who actually has their picture on Scout/Rivals is not satisfactory. Look at what those losers in Columbus are doing? They have a ton of kids begging for a scholarship offer right now, but they are going to make sure every 4-5 star they can wring out of this recruiting class signs first, and then give the 2nd string a chance. 150 scholarship offers out there, Really? What happens when all we have signed is the 130-150 of that list, and we don't have room for the top 130 that actually have people competing for them, so they can't make a decision yet. Someone call Torrian Wilson and ask if he has a little brother we can recruit in a couple years, because by the time he gets around to selecting a school, because he actually has alternatives, the best we are going to be able to do is preferred walk-on status. Really, Torrian, we can sign you as preferred and if you play your cards right you may get a scholarship by your Sophmore year, Really.

With Jason already considering a return to the Maize & Blue, it is now imperative that we do whatever we can to get Chris too. With a QB three-deep of all Forciers, we will be unstoppable. Imagine the All-Forcier triple option! The All-Forcier Wishbone. The All-Forcier I-formation.

Dileo chose the Wolverines over offers from Stanford, Virginia, Northwestern and Tulane. He caught 21 passes for 315 yards and four touchdowns as a junior, and added 760 rushing yards with nine scores.

Avast ye! Though I may be best “known” for philosophical musings and general nonsense, I do dabble in quantitative studies from time to time.

To the Number Crunching Gods, I offer up my crude financial analysis, so that we all may be enlightened regarding the scheduling practices with which we are so dissatisfied.

In FY08 M made $139,410,000 in Other Auxiliary Enterprises [heretofore referred to as "OAE" -ed.] Revenue -- which consists of revenues generated by "intercollegiate athletics, parking, student unions, university press and student publications." The order of that list, I am sure, puts the biggest moneymakers first and goes down from there. I'm not going to bother trying to figure out exactly how much athletics contributes proportionally, and it doesn't matter a whole lot, as we shall see.

They give some detail in terms of Auxiliary Enterprise Revenue, enough to figure out how much each category contributes to the total. OAE contributes 6% of the total revenue for this category.

Now, here is the weak spot in my analysis. They do not give detail for Auxiliary Enterprise Expenses (just the total figure), so I assumed that the proportions of costs in each category were distributed according to the proportions of revenue generation. This is almost certainly a false assumption, but it gives us an approximation to work with, and is probably not terribly far off.

So, with that in mind, I estimated OAE Expenses to be $133,760,370. Subtracting costs from revenues shows a yearly operating surplus of $5,649,630 for OAE.

What does this have to do with our emasculated football scheduling practices? Yes, that's right, now we are getting to the good stuff.

Using attendance figures and an estimate of 20,000 student tickets per game, and not counting validation stickers (data unavailable) I calculated the average revenue generated per home game at $5,455,438.14. The least profitable game was Miami (OH) at $4,876,700.00 and the most profitable was MSU at $6,399,490.00.

Given our estimate of the operating surplus for OAE (of which athletics is only a part – albeit the most significant part, financially) we find that the average revenue per home game is 97% of this surplus. So, on average, one game creates almost the entire operating surplus for those activities (see above to be reminded of other programs/departments under the auspices of OAE, in addition to the other sports under the athletic department). Even the lowest revenue generator (Miami) constitutes 86% of this surplus.

Behold the power of football.

No wonder Bill Martin is unwilling to have another away game, which would basically discard the entire operating surplus for the athletic department et al.

So it seems that Brian is right: It’s hopeless.

But not entirely! As you can see from the table below, variability in ticket pricing leads to significant results. A high-profile game like MSU cost $65/ticket while the average ticket price (excluding MSU) was $53.83. If we get a big-name team to play, then surely the ticket price could be jacked up enough to compensate for a good portion of lost revenue from the subsequent away game (see the table: total revenue for the MSU game was more than one million dollars above the average, again excluding MSU from the recalculated average). Given the positive externalities generated by these high-profile match-ups (namely, being taken seriously as a national power, which leads to increased revenue in the long-run) it seems reasonable to schedule them once in a while and make adjustments (in costs –do you really need another opium den, athletes?— and ticket pricing) to minimize the harm from lost revenue.

But will this happen? I doubt it, as the stated reason for the Endless Domer Duel (EDD) and the data available indicate a highly conservative financial philosophy… they just don’t seem willing to take risks. However, when (if) the economy rebounds and the financing of the new stadium construction becomes more manageable, we may see a decrease in this conservative approach. Let us pray.

Honestly, if an entity is going to have a Hall of Fame and put in Torretta before Howard, it better have a moment of introspection and decide whether it truly deserves to consider itself a "Hall of Fame." What's next? Inducting Eric Crouch and leaving Charles Woodson out? I guess I shouldn't put it past the voters.